Emily and Joey: November 2011

First off I am going to including many details in this post so if you don't want to know the details of my labor and delivery you may want to skip reading this post! I am really bad at writing in my journal so our blog has become my journal.

Our baby was due on November 9th, 2011 but both Joey and I felt that he would be later than his due date. Everyone is Joey's family wanted us to have him on November 11, 2011 (11/11/11) this would have been pretty cool because he is the 11th grandchild on both sides. Well the 9th rolled around and we were staying in Logan at my parent's house so that we wouldn't have to drive through the canyon while I was in labor, a choice I am very glad that we made! While in Logan my mom and sister made sure that I was walking around and doing lots of things. My sister, Tricia came to Logan with her three boys from Arizona to be here for me. We spent our time shopping, playing with her boys, and just waiting for my boy to come. My mom had me raking leaves and sent Joey and me on a walk. I thought it was funny, everyone wanted him here, as did I, but on his own time. I was just beginning to reach a little bit of an uncomfortable stage but overall I didn't feel 9 months pregnant. Many times I felt like I still had a month before I would have a beautiful baby boy in my life.

We went to bed the night of the 11th with many people "mad" at us for not having our baby on the 11th. Joey and I had felt that I would most likely make it till my induction date (Nov. 17) and labor would have to be induced. At 3:33am I felt like I was going to pee my pants so I stood up out of bed and right before I could open the door to our bedroom my water broke. I stopped where I was and turned to Joey and said his name, which he quickly sat up "what? What is going on?" I told him that my water had broke, it was pretty funny because I was staying somewhat calm and Joey being woken rapidly couldn't remember what we were supposed to do. We had to hurry and pack our bags (which we hadn't really done because both of us thought we still had a couple of days) go outside in the drizzling rain (which later turned into a nice big snow storm). We arrived at the hospital and they did an initial check, I was still at 1 cm dilated but effaced to 100%, also he had dropped to a 0 Station. At my last doctor's visit I was 1 cm dilated, 70% effaced, and he was high at a -2 station. Seeing that I wasn't that far along the nurse told me that I should go for a walk. Walking around was funny because there aren't that many hallways to walk down so you walk down a hall turn around and then walk down another hall.
My doctor had the night/day off so instead of having Dr Blackett we had Dr Kirkman. He is an amazing doctor and has delivered one of my nieces so I wasn't too worried about not having my doctor there. While we were walking the halls Dr Kirkman came up to us introduced himself and then we started talking about my options at this point. After your water breaks they like to have the delivery occur within 24 hours, because I was not progressed very far and this was my first pregnancy/labor he advised that if nothing happens in the next little while it would be a good idea to receive Pitocin to help induce me. We decided to keep walking around the halls and see how far I was at the next check. At this point in time the nurse and doctor were trying to nicely talk us into getting the Pit but not pressuring us into it. The reason for this is that almost every (if not all) of the women that were in labor at that time were wanting to go natural. For them this meant no Pit, no Epidural, etc. I had told the nurse that we were hoping that we didn't have to get an epidural but that it wasn't set in stone. These other women had many different techniques they were trying to go natural, one of which we doing Hypnobirthing, and another girl that we passed a few times walking in the hall had been in labor since 7pm the night before but she did not want to receive the Pit. Anyways after walking the halls and having only progressed to 3 cm dilated we decided to start the Pit at 10:30am. (7 hours since my water broke although it felt like it had only been 2 or 3). After I received the Pit I started to feel contractions (which at this point I hadn't really felt any at any point in my pregnancy or labor). At first they were very bearable and Joey and I were able to massage and breathe through the pain. My sister Tricia came to visit and we played Carcassonne one of our favorite games. This helped distract me for some time but as time passed my contractions moved to my back. Back labor became very painful and by 2:30pm I was still only dilated to 4 cm. I decided (felt prompted) that if I kept trying to breathe through the contractions for who knows how many hours that by the time I made it to delivery I would be out of energy and delivery would be very difficult. I say that I felt prompted because I had really had my mind set on delivering without an epidural and I knew that I was doing good focusing and breathing through the contractions but just felt like the best choice would be to receive an epidural. Even the nurse and the anesthesiologist said that I was doing a wonderful job breathing through the contractions ( I think the nurse thought I was as set on going natural as the other women in Labor and Delivery). Usually if someone had said that I was doing a good job working through them I would have stuck with it but I just felt that the right choice would be to get an epidural. At 2:30pm I received the epidural and was given the chance to lay down and rest. (To me the hours were flying by so even though it had been twelve hours at this point it felt like we had been there for 4 tops, also because it felt like time was flying by I can't remember a lot of what occurred that day other than walking the halls, breathing through contractions, and playing games with Tricia and Joey. At about 3:30/4:00pm Joey decided to run to my parent's house to get some food, as he wasn't too excited about eating another hospital sandwich. While he was gone the nurse came in and did another check at 4:30pm. I was dilated to 10 cm (fully dilated). Right after she got done checking me Joey walked in. The nurse and I both laughed and she was like "tell him the good news." "Perfect timing Joey, I am dilated to a 10" Joey started to glow, you could tell that he was nervous for delivery to actually occur but was so excited to become a father.
When you receive an epidural, especially with your first child the Logan hospital has you wait an hour before you start pushing. I can't remember what they called it but it is something like rest and drop. It is a time for the mother to rest and get energy to push while the baby starts to drop on his own. At 5:35 pm I started pushing with the contractions. The nurse helped show Joey when I should push so he was the one that did the counting and told me when to push and breath. At about 5:50 we saw the first little part of the babies head for the first time. It was amazing (we had a mirror at the end of the bed, which other girls that had been in our Prenatal Class thought was so weird but I thought it was amazing to be able to see my baby, it made pushing more worthwhile when you could see what each push was doing). Each time I would push I could see his head more and more. The doctor showed up at the perfect time. His head was crowning and I was able to reach down and touch my little baby for the first time, this as well helped me to continue pushing.
An hour after I started pushing our baby boy was born at 6:35pm! They were able to put him straight onto my belly and I was able to hold him while Joey cut his umbilical cord! After a minute the nurse took him away and started to give him oxygen, I was slightly confused because his color looked good (I guess he had started to turn a little blue-ish, but I was distracted by the thoughts that I had just had a baby). The nurses were good at staying calm although their was some chaos going on because another women was ready to start pushing but the doctor was still finishing up with me and they had asked for someone from respiratory to come help but he was needed in another room. The nurses said that we were a lower priority case and let the respiratory person go to the other room. The doctor was talking to me and I think trying to distract me from what was going on with our baby. After this they weighed him he was 8lbs 11oz and 20 1/2 inches long. He received APGAR scores of 7 and 9 which are really high, very few babies ever receive a perfect score of 10. These high scores made me even more confused at why they were taking him to the NICU. At this point all we knew is that he needed a CPAP for breathing, also at the end of delivery I had gotten a fever but it was too late to be put on antibiotics so they would need to do that for our little boy in the NICU.
After he was carted off to the NICU the nurse brought me some food to help me regain some strength, we went down to the NICU to see our little boy in a heating bed, with oxygen and a lot of wires. It is so sad to see something so little have so many wires (I know 8 lbs 11 oz is not little). At this point they had taken an X-Ray and found that there was air outside of his lungs, the pediatrician on call had called down to Mckay-Dee Hospital to get a second opinion. They both believed that he had Pneumothorax (meaning air in chest cavity) which is the less worrisome of the two things it could be. Both the doctors said that it would be best to just treat him for the infection from my fever and see how things looked later.
We had to leave him at this point to get checked into our Mother/Baby room. Finally at 11:30pm we were able to go back down to the NICU. When we walked in the room we noticed that he was no longer on oxygen! They said that he had only been on it for about an hour or two before he was able to breathe the oxygen in the room. Because he was off of the oxygen we were able to have skin to skin time. I was unable to breast feed him at this time because of the antibiotics and the IV. The IV was provided him the nutrients that he needed at this point so we were sent upstairs to start pumping my breast milk so by the time that he was able to breast feed they would be producing. I was able to breast feed him for the first time the next morning at 9:00 am. We did what was called SNS (supplemental nursing system), this is done by allowing the baby to latch to the breast as if he was nursing to help stimulate the milk to come in but because he would need more nutrients we used a syringe and a tube going into the mouth beside the nipple to give him the colostrum that I had pumped the night before. At about 3:00pm that afternoon we had to start doing SNS with formula because I was not pumping enough colostrum. At this point I was getting slightly discouraged (one of my greatest fears while I was pregnant is that I wouldn't be able to breast feed. As a human development major I am very pro-breast feeding and I knew that I would feel like a failure if I was unable to provide for my child). I was lucky enough to have some amazing nurses to help me feel better and let me know that it is normal to only get a few drops of colostrum the first few times that you pump. This really did make me feel a lot better. The nurses in the NICU were always amazing, they were so good at making us feel self-reliant and that they were just there for support and to help us. A few of the nurses told us that we were their favorite mom and dad in the NICU because we were able to do so much on our own without their help. The nurses told us that they felt like they were neglecting us but that we were doing everything so well on our own that they didn't really need to be there. Because of these nurses I felt blessed to have had our little boy in the NICU. Although it wasn't an ideal situation I believe that we received so much added attention and support that we left the hospital feeling like we really could do this and be great parents.
So Joey and I had not picked out a name for our little boy yet. We had thrown around some ideas but nothing was really standing out to us. My favorite that I have had picked out for a long time was Theophilus (nickname Theo, this was my Great Grandfather's name), Joey's favorite was John which he had liked because we would be naming him after John Jones, our friend's brother whom passed away in Nutty Putty Caves. (Joey was there the night that John became stuck and really made a connection with him that really made an impact in our lives). Some other names included Spencer (Joey's middle name), Stephen (after our "Dad" in Ghana), and Jake. We slowly dropped names that we didn't really like as much as others and when it was down to John and Theophilus we decided that any baby/person could look like a John (ex. John Doe) but that we both really like Theophilus and thought that he looked like a Theo. Then it came to the middle name. We had been planning on using the Ghanian day of the week name and because he was born on Saturday his name would be Kwame which just so happened to be one of our favorites. At the same time we were throwing around the idea of using Spencer as a middle name so that him and Joey would have that connection. We finally decided that Kwame would be his name! It was funny to see how many weird looks we received when we said it and how many nurses we had asking how to pronounce his name and what it meant but overall everyone really liked the name once we explained it.
Back to being in the NICU, on Sunday they had done another X-ray and found that he not only had Pneumothorax (remember how I said this was the lesser of two things it could be?) well he also had the worse of those two things, Pneumomediastinum which means air around the heart. This can be very bad because the air puts pressure on the heart so that it has a hard time pumping. Luckily the doctor still felt that both the Pneumothorax and the Pneumomediastinum were going to be able to work themselves out. Normally if it is bad they will have to go in with a needle and remove/release the air. At this point we were told that the air had most likely escaped from a hole in the lungs which had healed itself right after birth. They had been confused at how this had happened at birth because he hadn't been resuscitated which could be a cause for the air in outside the lungs if it had been pushed in but this had not occurred.
I felt bad for my nurses up on the Mother/Baby floor because I was never there when they needed to take my vitals and to give me my medicine. They would leave us hints that they needed to come check on me by leaving the blood pressure monitor outside our door. We spent most of our time down in the NICU feeding and bonding with our little guy. We only went upstairs to get food, get some rest, and when the nurses in the NICU were changing shifts because they discuss each patient with the new shift and for privacy they ask that only staff be in the NICU at this time. On Sunday and Monday we had a lot of visitors to come see Theo but because he was in the NICU most of them had to see him through the glass window. It was fun to show him off! Monday night our 48 hours were running up and we were released from the hospital but Theo was still in NICU and everyone at this point was telling us that he would be discharged the next day so we were very hopeful. Since my parent's live just up the hill from the hospital we decided to spend the night at their house instead of doing the hotel stay at the hospital. We stayed at the hospital until around 1am Tuesday morning to finish his feeding and then we went to my parent's house for the night. We had no idea what time he would be discharged so we packed snacks for all day and also made sure we had clothes to bring him home in and his car seat ready. We both were sure it wouldn't be until later Tuesday night that he would be released. We arrived back at the hospital at 6:00 that morning, did his first feeding, the tech came in to take an Xray (Oh yeah also at this point he was no longer on the IV which made it a whole lot easier to feed and hold him although he still had monitors hooked to him his IV was always more in the way). Then we hungout for a little bit then his doctor came in said that the X-Rays didn't look perfect but they looked pretty good and over time the air will escape on its own and that we were pretty much good to go. From the time we got the news that he would be coming home that morning to the time we actually walked out the door seemed like it was forever. They had to make sure that we had gone through all the education, do a car seat test/check, pack up all the things that we would need (we got a ton of things to take home with us from the NICU) finally at 11:30am we were able to take our Theophilus home with us! It was so nice to have him off of all the monitors and wire-free. It made holding him and cuddling him so much easier!
Since we have been home we have completely got him off the SNS. Also he had his first check-up two days later on Thursday and he looks really good and his color is amazing! I love leaving the appointments or every time that we had been away from the NICU and came back and were given good news. It seemed like every time they got test results back he was doing better and better. He is definitely a fighter and my little champ. While he was in the NICU all the nurses that would come in would be so surprised at how big he was, because they normally don't see big babies in the NICU.

Things I want to remember about him from the Hospital:

~One of his favorite things while he was in the heating bed was to just lounge out like he was laying out on a beach enjoying the rays! This was one of the first things we noticed when we first went into the NICU after he was delivered. It was adorable.
~The nurses were so surprised at how easily he latched on for breast feeding. He was definitely a natural.
~He loved skin-to-skin time or just cuddling and so did we. We knew that we needed to get back up to our room on the Mother/Baby floor but it was so hard to leave when you were holding him. The world just seemed perfect to have such an adorable little boy cuddling up close against you. I had told Joey about this one day when he wanted to go back upstairs to rest and then the next day when he was holding him he turned to me and told me that he understood what I meant now. It was just too hard to put him back in his bed and say goodbye.

If you made it through this post I am surprised and thank you for caring so much about our experience! Sorry it was so long but as I said in the beginning this is my journal entry and I don't want to forget anything.